Rancho Viejo solar project is a bad idea for the area
Iam strongly opposed to the proposed AES Rancho Viejo Solar Project, primarily due to the possibility of loss of life and property owing to fire or explosion.
The Risk Factor website (tinyurl. com/54z9h4wh) already estimates “moderate risk” of wildfire in the next 30 years for the 9,879 homes in Eldorado and adjacent areas.
Approving permitting for this plant without first putting in place a tested, comprehensive evacuation plan seems rash, to say the least; Santa Fe County is currently in default of devising and maintaining any evacuation plan for the county at large, which suggests significant lack of preparation in dealing with the exigencies of this permitting process.
AES has experienced two significant fires at plants it has set up in Arizona. The first, in Surprise, Ariz., in April 2019, involved a thermal runaway event resulting in a deflagation that seriously injured four firefighters. (An account of the explosion can be found at the National Fire Prevention Association website at tinyurl.com/47pjjsjh.)
One notable point about this event is that there were initially no flames, but the buildup of toxic gases, including hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide, needed an immediate response and would have mandated an evacuation in an inhabited area. The thermal runaway obviously required the management of a hazmat crew, but first responders claim in the podcast cited above that AES and the utility supplied local responders with little instruction about the nature of the risks and possible cures.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that a lithium-ion battery storage system is highly dangerous even when not actively in flames. In this instance, it took a passing motorist to sound the alarm about the presence of toxic gases, suggesting that the plant was not being monitored, either in situ or remotely. A second battery storage fire in Chandler, Ariz., in April 2022, burned for multiple days.
The Eldorado Fire Department, which would be among the first to respond to a disaster, is a volunteer emergency and rescue organization. While AES claims that it plans to offer training to local fire departments, it is cruel to ask our local volunteers and professionals to shoulder the burden of trying to extinguish complex, poisonous, extremely dangerous fires when there currently is no agreement on best practices and the chemicals to be used to fight the fires are themselves toxic. Some chemicals to fight fires might be withdrawn by manufacturers.
Even if we concur with AES that it has learned valuable lessons after each of these recent fires, it is obvious that the technology requires further improvement to be safe at utility scale near inhabited areas.
An article published in the engineering journal Process Safety Progress (June 2023, “Lessons Learned from Large-Scale Lithium-Ion Battery Energy Storage Systems”) observes that there are “gaps in the existing standards” for safety. Why rush into siting this plant, with these sponsors, in this location, when the technology is clearly still developmental and the risk of death, injury, and property loss is unacceptably high?